FASHION

Evening Star, Issue 22351, 29 May 1936, Page 11

FASHION

AN ECONOMIC DICTATOR IMPORTANCE OF FRILLS A changing female silhouette is a major world economic phenomenon. The jump in' the world rayon output from 100,000,0001 b in 1925 to 750,000,0001 bin 1934, 900.000,000 in 1935, with the billion mark forecast for 1936, is intimately connected with the fashion situation, writes G. Patrick Thompson, in ‘ Britannia and Eve,’ London. The Japanese have been paying for warships and their Manchurian exploit with proceeds of sales of silk stockings, rayon panties, and synthetic pearls in America and 30 other countries. Germany has gained some of the foreign exchange to pay for the biggest rearmament programme ever, through Anglo-Saxon demand for special dyes and the synthetic jewellery they make so well in the machine shops of Pforzheim. A large part of the economic recovery of Ulster, centre of the linen industry, is due to an immense British and American fashion demand for linen —a demand which has doubled the price of raw material, flax, in a year, to the great glee of our old friends the Russians, who grow 90 per cent, of the world crop. “ A thick moire lame, shot through with copper thread, is among the loveliest of the new materials, but there are also supple taffetas woven with metal threads. ...” “ Metal buttons

on gunmetal are the new season’s choice.” In such scintillating trifles the discerning learn that resourceful metalmarketing and development associations have forced an outlet for their products in the fashion field. Probe the frock that moulds the figure ; the decollete gown that stays up magically without shoulder straps, the perforated rubber girdle, ornamental garters, and you find the enterprising central exploitation bureau of the rubber industry. “ An extraordinary raw green, bright blue, combinations of green and brown and yellow, violet, and purple are some of the colours that we snail see in next season’s collections ...” BIGGEST INDUSTRY. Just a hint, that, why heavy chemical combines are spending more money looking for new textile dyes, and for dyes and processes which will succeed with new materials, than in research on new explosives and poison gases. Therefore, using advertising and publicity expenditure as a yard stick, beautifying and adorning the female of the species is the world’s biggest industry. Automobiles, patent medicines, and branded foods stand lower on a space basis. An interested statistician has estimated that last year in the two biggest markets, Britain and the United States, around £400,000,000 worth of women’s raiment became obsolete. That amount had to be spent on renewals, thereby demonstrating that as a device for increasing the velocity circulation of money all the nostrums devised by academicians pale beside a major change in women’s fashions. Beauty parlours are increasing. Saturation point in the beauty-prepara-tions market is decades off. Five years hence, a 193 u world expenditure of £200,000,000 lor powder, cold cream, perfumes, lipsticks, and other aids to female attractions, will look like a depression figure. An annual figure for Britain of 10,000,000 boxes of rouge and £1,250,000 worth of hair-colouring substances (only a fourth of American expenditure! will look modest. Mass production technique and high pressure salesmanship wore harnessed to the fashion business for the first time when, one pre-war day, Premier Asquith’s brilliant and individualistic wife allowed her favourite Paris dressmaker to hold a fashion show for her friends at Xo. 10 Downing street. On the economic side this meant nothing, for fashion then was monopolised by a small world of aristocrats, plutocrats,

smart actresses, and expensive demimondaines, buying at high prices. MASSED PRODUCTION. Two more decades were to pass, however, before the fashion lords Ijnked up with the masters of the massproduction machines, thereby enabling the small-income woman to buy at a big store a copy of an authentic model frock, coat, hat, or scarf ... an article of raiment of a cut and style which formerly was available only to those women who had acquired, byfame, marriage, inherited, or gouged money, the large financial key to the fitting room of a Schiaparelli, Patou, Worth, or Molyneux. . . Late in 1934 a number of the British Royal family sponsored a fashion movement in cotton fabrics. The Royal initiative was not Jinked to any propaganda to aid the depressed cotton industry. Nevertheless, sales of Lancashire cotton goods in the Home market rose nine million yards in four months. A leading cotton man calculated tnat if only petticoats could be charmed back into favour the industry would regain all the 200 million yards it had lost in the home market; a loss which has been rayon’s gain. . Early in nis regime Mussolini was applauding “ naturalism ” in women. The regime frowned on plucked eyebrows, rouge, lipstick, and “ that parish look.” An attempt was made to build up characteristic Italian fashions. There were official designs ot approved gowns. The concensus ot opinion among the younger women was that they were terrible. • In time, Mussolini discovered that women could not be dragooned as easily as men, and that to interfere with women’s ideas ot how to look attractive is to make a worse blunder in human psychology than the one made by the American political leaders who tried to outlaw alcohol. Neither Italian industry nor the State finances could stand the strain. The Nazi drive against cosmetics, silk stockings, and other appurtenances of the fashion - conscious female, was ended by an official ukase to the effect that Nazi zealots must not go about washing synthetic tints on: ladies’ faces; and, further, that a nice taste in chiffon blouses and lipsticks is not incompatible with loyalty to the leader. Nazi puritanism was lulling one of the most prolific of the geese that laid .the golden eggs of national revenue. CANNOT NEGLECT MARKET. Austere Socialists who thought that the women of the new order in Russia would be content to wear a “ rational uniform dress, have been sadly disappointed at a widespread reversion to the old Eve, with all its dangers of incitement to individual competition, growth of external social differentiations, and thoughts flying away to the gayer and lighter side of life. 9be Soviet rulers, too, have found that they cannot neglect a market of 40,000,OCX! women. It was short skirts that first made women stocking-conscious, and thereupon huge businesses have been erected whose taxable profits are an important item in the national finances of Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, France, and the U.S.« And the popularity of the flesh-cloured stockings brings a very large revenue to the manufacturers of special soap products; for women now wash their stockings almost as habitually and regularly as they brush their teeth. Fashion designers nave found_ apparently inexhaustible mines of inspiration in the different periods of European and Asiatic art, and the peasant inodes of Mediterranean fishing villages, Basque hamlets, and Austrian mountain resorts. But more and more the great American film factories, with their synthetic and enormously popularised beauties, envied and studied by tens of millions of girls and women, are influencing women’s fashions, both directly and indirectly.

Austere mom lists and sociologists liavo deplored the ever-rising ligures of fashion and lieautification expenditure. But our civilisation could not now go Puritan and mile out frills, fal-lals, perfumes, face paint and powders, and fashions. Its debts, and its industrial life, would not permit it-